The studio moguls were certainly bigger-than-life figures, but they were also tough and unforgiving street fighters to a man, redeemed only because they were also the butt of so many Hollywood jokes.

I attended first a military academy, then a public school in Beverly Hills, where we lived, and many of my classmates were the children of movie stars and studio executives.

Anywhere you see street fighters,you've just seen people that can't reason with their minds,but only with their fists.

Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.

Do we really want 6-year-olds to become street fighters?

I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do.